Billg's billions keep rolling in

Much to the dismay of Microsoft opponents, the IT giant is forging ahead at full steam despite allegedly being pecked to death by penguins, people switching to Macs and nobody buying Windows Vista. Although some revenue was deferred from October, Microsoft racked up US$14.4 billion in revenue for the last quarter. In overly-strong Kiwi dollars, that's $19.5 billion.

Nothing much in the IT world can keep up with Microsoft in the money stakes. This year, it looks like revenue will be NZ$77 billion with NZ$30 billion income. Google and Apple pale in comparison.

Microsoft reckons it has shipped some twenty million Vista licenses already; while it's early days yet, signs point to Vista nay-sayers being wrong. The demand is there.

The chinks in Microsoft's fiscal armour remain online services and entertainment, with the latter even going backwards by a fifth in the last quarter. It looks like Microsoft is still very much a traditional software company; and, if that's what people want, who can fault MS?

Posted by Juha Saarinen at 10:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

After flirting with "flat rate" plans, ISPs are again capping users.

Remember how Telecom canned Go Large? Even with the restrictions placed on the plan, Go Large users chewed up three to four times as much data as other Telecom DSL users.

Now Woosh has decided to cap its Orbit Flatrate plan to 10GB because...

You may have noticed a performance decrease over the last few months. This has been the result of high demand on our Orbit Flatrate plan. We want all customers to get the most enjoyment from their broadband connection, and as such we have decided that the plan withdrawal is necessary to ensure ongoing quality of service.

The new 10GB plan costing $50 a month will come into effect on June 1 says Woosh.

It looks like the "pain threshold" at which ISPs' networks and possibly also their slim profit margins break is at a comparatively low 5 to 10GB per customer.

"Who uses that much? I get by on 500MB a month," some people protest whenever data usage is discussed. That is true: if all you use your Internet connection for is reading email and a bit of web browsing, 1GB a month is probably ample.

However, try using VoIP, Joost or Vuze P2PTV for instance and you'll go through 1GB in a few hours. Joost uses 756kbit/s down and 256kbit/s up worth of bandwidth; not exactly staggering figures, but it works out at over 400MB per hour.

Ten gigabytes of data provides 25 hours of Joosting a month, or six hours and fifteen minutes a week. Remember though, that's just for Joost: if you use your connection for anything else like updating Windows, the 10GB cap will shrink faster.

Yes, I know: watching TV over the Internet is hardly a high-priority activity in the grand scheme of things and we still have Ye Olde Analogue broadcasts that serve us just fine without busting data caps.

But let's say we want to use our Internet connections for more than just email and a spot of web browsing - dial-up handles that in fact, no broadband needed. How much data do we need?

I'm picking moderate usage should be between 30 to 50GB a month. Heavy usage, twice that. However, I suspect the Internet in NZ at least would melt down at such usage levels...

Posted by Juha Saarinen at 10:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Further proof that US companies are oblivious to English as spoken by the rest of the world (ie. the vast majority) has emerged.

Intel has never been great with product names, but at least they've stayed away from the risible unlike Microsoft which is quite happy marketing OneCare for instance.

That was broken recently, when head boffin Justin Rattner launched Phase-Change RAM.

Instead of calling it PC-RAM however, Intel went with PRAM. Oh dear. I suppose "perambulator" and its abbreviated form has disappeared from American usage.

Either way, this unfortunately named memory technology could be good because:

PRAM is based on chalcogenide glass, which can be altered using the heat generated by an electric current. Heat changes the physical structure of the glass to either a crystalline or amorphous state. Each of these states has a distinct electrical resistance that is used to represent the ones and zeroes needed to represent stored data in binary terms.

Chalcogenide! Wonderful.

The key point of PRAM is that it's faster than today's non-volatile FLASH memory, and could possibly end up as a replacement for Dynamic RAM.

That'd be something else - a computer that you can switch off without worrying about the memory contents. I'd like that.

Posted by Juha Saarinen at 8:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Gotta get that iPhone working first!

The US edition of Computerworld has some reactions to Apple's announcement that OS X 10.5 or Leopard, will be delayed by four months because of iPhone.

In brief, the delay has Mac fans foaming at the mouth with anger.

That's kind of surprising. I thought the Mac iFaithful would welcome the delay, because it means... errm, that Apple's doing the job so well that it doesn't want to release the Leopard on time, or something like that.

Thing is, nobody bought that line when Microsoft let the Vista deadline slide (and sliiiiiddde), so it's not going to work for Apple either. Not holding my breath, but I think the Leopard launch will launch into with Vista with Service Pack 1 applied, which will essentially be the true Vista release version, the one that works well enough to be useful for the majority of people. Not that I think it will matter much, as Microsoft has more than enough on its plate, trying to shine at least some positive light on Vista.

While you wait for the Leopard to come prowling, here are some leaked screenshots, courtesy of Think Secret.

Posted by Juha Saarinen at 1:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So you thought insecure animated cursors was bad?

Well, it was (and is if you haven't patched) but how about error messages? The latest round of patches from Microsoft fixed a security hole in that lets crackers locally and remotely exploit error message handling:

A remote code execution vulnerability exists in the Windows Client/Server Run-time Subsystem (CSRSS) process because of the way that it handles error messages. An attacker could exploit the vulnerability by constructing a specially crafted application that could potentially allow remote code execution.

Additionally, if a user viewed a specially crafted Web site, an attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could take complete control of an affected system.

The vulnerability is marked as Critical across all supported versions of Windows, including Vista.

CSRSS seems to be part of the Terminal Services stuff in Windows - The Client-Server Runtime Subsystem is the process and thread manager for all logon sessions.

What next...

Posted by Juha Saarinen at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It'll be satellite only to start with though.

From the Possibly Too Little, Too Late Dept: Digital TV launches in May.

TVNZ, Radio NZ, Maori TV and CanWest are rolling out Digital TV over satellite next month, over TCFKABCL (ie. Kordia) supplied links. Terrestrial digital broadcasts are set to happen by February next year however.

I don't know what to think of this. If it had been say five years ago, I'd have been more enthusiastic. Now however... I wonder if it isn't too late? The idea is nice, but with IP-delivered media waiting in the wings, how much chance does free-to-air digital TV stand?

There is no information as of present on how much the gear to watch Freeview will cost. How well does it work? I have no idea. Despite repeated requests, I haven't been allowed near the digital broadcast trials. Kordia/BCL and its partners like to do things in secret, which I don't think is on actually, given that they're playing with taxpayer money.

Posted by Juha Saarinen at 11:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I only just found out that the scroll wheel on mice works with tabs in Firefox 2.0.

Yes, yes, so you've RTFM'ed and found about this in 1995 already. I had the mouse cursor pointing to the upper area of the Firefox window, where the tabs with the different webpages are.

And... I twiddled the scroll wheel by accident, and the tabs, well, scrolled.

This is very n00b, but I can't tell you have pleased I am to have found that feature. I have lots and lots of tabs open in Firefox, and being able to scroll between them is a great time-saver.

Not a biggie, but IE7 doesn't do it. :)

Posted by Juha Saarinen at 9:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Is nothing secure any more?

That was the question in my mind this morning, as I woke up XP and found that Windows Update had downloaded some patches overnight.

The details for the patches are available from Microsoft here, but check this out...

Stack-based buffer overflow in the animated cursor code in Microsoft Windows 2000 SP4 through Vista allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code or cause a denial of service (persistent reboot) via a malformed .ANI, cur, or .ico file, which results in memory corruption when processing cursors, animated cursors, and icons...

All versions of Windows are affected, with Windows 2000 the hardest and Vista the least - so get patching.

Speaking of security, I note that a new Stration worm variant is being emailed out at the moment. NOD32 identifies it as Win32/Stration.XW. I got two samples in that usual, idiotic "Mail Server Report - install this Update" social engineering style message. Keep your antivirus up-to-date and don't shoot yourself in the foot by running untrusted attachments, mmkay?

Posted by Juha Saarinen at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)